The U.S. government is relaxing restrictions on foreign sales of high-speed computers. The changes will allow U.S. technology companies to sell fast computers to customers in Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America, and most of Africa.

The government had previously restricted exports of machines considered powerful enough to design weapons. In January, though, President Clinton proposed to ease export controls, which hadn't been adjusted since 1993.

"Any type of business that uses high-end desktop computing would benefit, in most places in the world,'' says Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America, a trade group that supports the changes.

"We have now discovered that [computers] are fungible items," Secretary of State Colin Powell said recently. "They're all over the world, and if we don't sell them, somebody else will.''

The new rules will nearly triple the speed of computers that may be sold to China, India, the former Soviet Union, Central Europe, and some countries in the Middle East. The new speed of such computers cannot exceed 85,000 million theoretical operations per second (Mtops), which is equivalent to about 32 linked Pentium III desktops. A virtual embargo continues on sales of computer hardware to Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria.

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